
Or, how overcoming our greatest error involves confronting our greatest terror, and vice versa
In the graduate program where I teach, we often ask our students to propose successive lists of keywords to help them name the intuitions that motivate their research agendas. At first, the words tend to be unadventurous, conforming to a received horizon of expectations — a kind of residual fear of using the “wrong word” leads to the error of falling prey to lexical hegemony — but by slowly digging beneath the dominant vocabulary, they invariably come upon slightly new ways of talking better suited to their tasks and desires. Lexical errancy of this kind has a heuristic effect and the word lists often end up being quite surprising. Recently, one young researcher proposed a list containing the following words: Millenarianism, Faith, Celestial Jerusalem, Rainbows, Stars, Hope, Revolution… Odd as they seem at first glance, the words don’t so much delineate a field of research as open a horizon and point to something far beyond. Such terms name a horizon that we — secular leftist intellectuals — have mistakenly given up on. Hence the relative discomfort we feel when we hear tell of Millenarianism or Celestial Jerusalem (except of course it comes from a Jehovah’s Witness). We have given up, no doubt erroneously, on any and all forms of transcendence, which we have come to associate, not without some justification, with the most iniquitous predatory projects (colonialism, exploitation, and so on) at the heart of which transcendence functioned as a kind of metaphysical palliative. But not only have we made transcendence a bad word; worse still, we have replaced it by a form of “pure immanence,” which, having no anchor point in our Western tradition, has ended up playing the role of an inverted transcendence. The pure immanence of possessive individualism, and the system of accumulation that is inseparable from it, have imposed themselves, through the collapse of any horizon, as the abyssal immanence of consumerism.